In 2024, creative industries minister Chris Bryant admitted that Brexit had made touring in Europe “simply not economically viable” for many artists.
this post was submitted on 20 Jan 2026
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I work in the livesound field, and to my experience, music and music business are separate things. You need business management knowledge to be a band/an artist these days. Or you hire someone for that. The desaster mentioned in the article is a home made problem, this should have been calculated beforehand (probably was) but even if artists don‘t break even there will always be someone saying „but the output and reception you will receive is your capitalism the future“ (marketing). I pity British artists because brexit but business is business. calculate beforehand.
I genuinely believe though that artists should be optimizing for in person revenue and cheap or free music downloads as marketing.
Yes, same. Music is open source.
think about the times we shared tapes with each other.
What are those "withholding taxes"? Is it something most of which they will get back in a year or two?
And of course: Why does Sony organize tours this way? Make them employees of a EU-based company and pay them through that. Should remove most of complications.
In some countries, if you hire artists for an event, you are responsible for withholding taxes that are due on the artist’s income. Regular employment often works like this too. Taxes that are withheld at the source are called withholding taxes.
For example if I were to host an artist from the UK for an event here in Germany, I would have to deduct ~15% of their pay and pay it directly to the German tax authority. Basically in the same way that if I hired an employee in Germany I would have to estimate the income tax on their salary and withhold it too.
You can’t generally get these taxes back because they are normal taxes that are just paid in a specific way. But foreign artists from a country that both taxes foreign income and has some kind of double taxation agreement with the country they’re performing in would be able to get some of their tax payments back. There may be other reasons too, I’m not familiar with regulations regarding artists.
For normal employees it’s not uncommon either for the final tax to be different from what was withheld and then the difference is paid/reimbursed when they file their taxes.
So, they somehow forgot that income tax exists?
How can the existence of income tax come as a surprise?
Income tax only exists over a certain threshold in the UK, so they would be expecting a fair amount back if they didn't earn particularly much l
Ah, and they didn't expect the non-UK income and the UK income to count towards the same threshold?
At least in Finland the 0% tax bracket ends at something like 1300 € per month, and I doubt they were getting that little per person for touring internationally.
Interesting, thanks for sharing.
hello,
Sony doesn’t book tours. they are a label.
Isn't the point of a label to organize getting money to you from people listening to your music?
yes, supposedly. Inherently they‘re concept is publishing, but the margins on streaming revenue are slim to none so touring is in fact a viable way of creating income. and big labels operate on the same principle as any commercial company, money. it is not art or fame or glory, it is money.
If you like there is a recent video from Benn Jordan on YT analyzing revenue streams from streaming companies. fucked up
Yeah, I'm aware of this.
Didn't Spotify just move to a system where they will pay anything at all only to 12% of their artists?
They sure did. F**kers.
Paywalled.
And auto playing video of something entirely different.